So about that eye appointment yesterday.  After this miraculous recovery, it would be a bitter irony if I ended up losing the other eye too due to a medical error.  I’m not sure I wasn’t pretty close to that happening yesterday afternoon.  It frightened me at the time, it horrified Rachael when I told her what happened after I got home, and I still feel shaken this morning.  So listen up, and maybe learn something that could change your life someday.

I’m waiting in the hall, in the same spot Bruce and Rachael and I sat waiting about a week ago.  My name gets called, and I get shown into room 12 where I’m told to wait for the person who will arrive shortly.  When he does, he starts off by saying what’s going to happen.  He’s going to administer anaesthetizing eye drops in one eye, dilate it, and then give me the injection I need.  They’d do both today, but since I’m driving I’ll need one eye left undilated so I can drive home afterwards.  I should plan on coming back for the other eye in a few days.  And then I should plan on coming back in mid-February to repeat the process, and then again in March.

I’m a little slow on the uptake sometimes, so first I point out that driving isn’t a concern because I’ll take Uber.  I’m more concerned though about the need to be here in a month, because we don’t plan to be in town (it’s about that green light we’ve still kept you hanging over).  Mostly though I’m confused, because I thought I was here for a follow up vision test.  In fact I’ve got two back to back appointments here today - the field of vision test and an eye scan.  Neither of these sounds like shots in both eyeballs to me.  I ask him what this is about, and about the second appointment also.  

He tells me the shots are to drain blood from the back of the eyes to get the pressure off the optic nerves.  And the other appointment is for that eye scan I just had before I came to him.  I correct him - I’ve had no eye scan.  My name was called, I was led here.  That gives him pause, because the scan has to come first, before the eyes get dilated.  He pulls up his chart, and then somewhere in here the realization comes that he thinks I’m someone else.  He’s treating the wrong patient.  There’s been a medical procedural error, and at no point did anyone perform the standard patient identification protocol: what is your name, what is your date of birth.  They’re prepared to stab me in the eyeballs based on whether I correctly heard my name called from down the hall.  It’s like one of those medical horror stories where they destroy some poor sap’s life by amputating the wrong arm.  That was nearly me.

No problem!  He leads me down the hall to another room, where someone has been repeatedly calling my name for the last ten minutes wondering if I’m a no show.  As we go, we pass another man with obvious vision problems waiting for his name to be called.  He’s probably named Scott too.

The lesson of course is that we’re all just people, and mistakes happen.  There’s this horror show, but there’s also the failure of three straight medical professionals to recognize that they didn’t know what’s wrong with my eyes and what the blinding headache was about and send me to someone who might have saved the right eye too while there was still time.

I consider myself really fortunate.  Fortunate because I dodged two bullets here and am still functional, and lucky too because of who I am and how I approach the world.  If I hadn’t finally woken up in the middle of the night, reached in the dark for the iPad, and started researching for whether there was any connection between terrible headaches, vision loss and stroke, i wouldn't have learned I was having a medical emergency and have finally gotten the help I needed before it really was too late.

So the lesson here of course is that we’re all just people, mistakes happen, and you can reduce your risk by being your own best advocate to protect your health.  And since most of you are cyclists out on the road surrounded by hazards, you already know this from personal experience.  When you come to a red light, you don’t just start biking because it’s green now, you wait to be sure no one else is speeding through because they’re an aggressive driver or staring at their phone.  When you come to a one way street you look both ways anyway, because every thousandth time someone is coming the other way because they’ve just screwed up or gotten disoriented.  I’ve done it myself and probably many of you have too. 

This was obviously a significant procedural error, one that Keizer should know about.  I do my part on that by sending a lengthy message to Dr Torres, my excellent ophthalmologist, trusting he’ll know what to do with the information.  And then I’ll do my best to put this out of my memory as just another near miss and get on with life a little wiser and more experienced.  if you’re paying attention in life, the disasters younavoid are all little teaching lessons, ones you can absorb and improve your odds in the future.